I have all the time in the world for a droll, old-timey recipe title, the more obtuse and obscured in layers of misheard words and regional vernacular the better. Fortunately, as well as having the kind of eye-catching name that caught my eye and made me want to bake them instantaneously, these Joe Froggers are also strikingly delicious.

Unlike say, the Bobby Dazzler cake that I made some years ago, these cookies have a more direct provenance. The “Joe” part of the name represents one Joseph Brown, a freed former slave and tavern owner from Massachusetts. The recipe itself is thanks to his wife Lucretia for which I am many years later extremely grateful; the “froggers” part remains a mystery but I’m glad it’s there. With a fierce bite of rum and an intense scattering of spices throughout the molasses darkness these are no ordinary cookies — chewy, heady, fragrant, somehow cooling and ramping up your internal thermostat at the same time. Far be it from me to suggest an improvement on such a strong recipe, but dipping the cookies in white chocolate is more of a variation — an auxiliary cookie with great respect to the source material.

And you may well think that adding white chocolate to an already sweetened cookie is gilding the lily but I had a powerful notion that the unassuming, vanilla-softness of the white chocolate would be a charming contrast against the robust, confrontational molasses — like wearing a clashing print, or mixing pink and red together — and not only did these two opposites attract, they were ravenously spectacular together. Not just in terms of flavour, where the muted, buttery sweetness of the white chocolate made the molasses shine like a torch through swamp water, but also in terms of texture — that firm, snappish layer giving way to chewy, dense cookie.

I found this recipe in the King Arthur Essential Cookie Companion, which has certainly justified its title to me. As well as being preposterously delicious, this recipe is also easy — a melt-and-mix number that uses zero bowls and one saucepan, with no rolling, shaping, or cutting out involved. Measuring out all the spices is a little fiddly perhaps, but worth it when they play so beautifully together — the fiery heat and fireside cosiness of ginger and clove, the gentle woodiness of nutmeg and allspice, against the throat-prickling pepperiness of molasses.

I make a lot of cookie recipes on this blog but now and then one comes along that I know is going to be The Cookie of the Year; I didn’t expect to find The Cookie so soon but I will absolutely be recreating batch after batch after batch of these as fast to keep up with the overwhelming demand (from myself).

If you’re wondering how to use the rest of the jar of molasses, first of all I’d suggest simply making more of these superlative cookies, otherwise, try this Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf, based on Bryant Terry’s incredible Ginger-Molasses Cake, or this Blackberry White Pepper Gingerbread, my variation on Nigella Lawson’s vegan gingerbread.

PS: If you’re after a way to support a local charity who are doing their level best to get in on the ground and provide aid to people in Palestine, despite nonstop setbacks and ongoing atrocities, ReliefAid are doing amazing work.

White Chocolate-Dipped Joe Frogger Cookies

These spice-spiky, rum-rich cookies are already spectacular — and spectacularly named — but the white chocolate takes them to another level both tastewise and texturally. I am beyond delighted with these and will be making numerous batches for the forseeable future. Recipe adapted from the King Arthur Baking Company book, The Essential Cookie Companion.

• 115g butter
• 115g brown sugar
• 160ml (2/3 cup) molasses
• 3 tablespoons dark rum
• 275g flour
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 250g good white chocolate

1: In a large saucepan over low heat, stir together the 115g each butter and brown sugar, the 2/3 cup of molasses and the three tablespoons of rum until the butter melts and it all forms a dark pool. Remove from the heat.

2: Sieve in the dry ingredients — the 275g flour, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons ginger, 1/2 teaspoon each nutmeg and cloves, 1/4 teaspoon allspice, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. The sieving here is mainly for the benefit of the baking soda, to ensure lump-free incorporation. Stir everything together to form a sticky dough.

3: Let the saucepan cool down slightly, then refrigerate — just by putting the whole pan in the fridge — for half an hour. At this point, set your oven to 190C/350F and rip a sheet of baking paper to cover a flat cookie tray.

4: After the half hour of refrigerating is up, drop tablespoonfuls of the sticky dough onto the paper lined cookie tray, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie. You don’t have to worry about shaping the dough or rolling it into balls, as it’s just too sticky and it takes care of itself in the oven.

5: Bake the cookies for 11 minutes. If you want them more evenly round, enclose each cookie, straight from the oven, in an upturned cup or mug (of wider diameter, of course) and move it briskly in a circular movement on the tray, which will coax the cookie’s edges into a circle shape. Allow the cookies to cool completely on a wire rack. Melt the white chocolate — either in a microwave or in a metal bowl perched on top of a pan of simmering water, but not actually touching the water — and either half-dip the cooled cookies in the chocolate, or use a spoon to drizzle and drop the chocolate thickly across them.

Makes around 16 cookies. Store them in an airtight container in the fridge.

Notes:

• I haven’t tried it but you could probably quite safely use coconut oil or vegan butter in place of the butter here, and swap the white chocolate for dark — it will have a different flavour effect but will doubtless still taste great.
• No dark rum, or don’t want to use it? First of all, rather than fork out for a full bottle, grab one of those little minibar-sized bottles that they usually sell behind the counter at liquor shops for an easy way to fulfil the 3 tablespoons quota; otherwise replace it with apple juice or water.

music lately:

Down By The Water by PJ Harvey, you know when a song comes on in a shop that’s so specific that you’re quite sure everyone working there is just a friend you haven’t met yet? And you’re standing there nodding and smiling warmly beside a rack of scarves by way of demonstrating your endorsement of the music choice? No? Well how else could you explain playing this song by PJ Harvey if you don’t intend to be my best friend forever?

Up on the Sun by Meat Puppets, as well as being pleasingly geologically opposite to the above song, I want to live inside that yawning, bars-long “uhhhhhhh” before the chorus commencing around the 2:20 mark, despite erring on the side of discordant and not really resolving it’s unbelievably satisfying and warm and sunny, but then so is the whole song.

Surrey with the Fringe on Top, performed by Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones and Many a New Day by Jones from the 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, a cast recording I’ve become re-obsessed with. It reimagines the mood of the original without tweaking barely a word of the libretto; stripping back the orchestrations and somehow making the already deceptively lustful show even more so (the performance of Surrey is almost Samantha Jones-esque in places). It also ramps up the pre-existing menace further; stunningly personified in Rebecca Naomi Jones’ arresting delivery of “snow white horses” in Surrey and the entirety of Many a New Day, I’ve never even been a significant fan of Oklahoma! as an entity but I simply cannot stop listening to this cast recording.